Book Prize

Through the Children’s History Book Prize, the New-York Historical Society honors the best children’s historical literature and encourages authors to continue to create engaging and challenging narratives that provide a window into the past for middle readers and their families. The winning author is awarded $10,000. The jury comprises librarians, educators, historians, and families with middle grade readers.

The New-York Historical Society is dedicated to exploring history through characters and narrative. To support this endeavor, the Barbara K. Lipman Children’s History Library in the DiMenna Children’s History Museum has a wide selection of children’s books about American and New York history, and hosts a variety of book-focused family programs, including the Reading into History Family Book Club, Sunday Story Time, and Little New-Yorkers.

Winner of the 4th annual Children’s History Book Prize:Unbound: A Novel in Verse by Ann E. Burg

When Grace turns nine, she is forced to leave the daily work of helping Aunt Sara tend her baby brothers and the daily joy of seeing Mama come home each night from the fields—she must now work in the plantation kitchen. Faced with the horror of being permanently separated from her family, she urges them all to flee to the swamps. Told through Grace's eyes, the story unfolds with a combination of historical precision, honesty, and adventure. Burg’s research is based in part on narratives of the formerly enslaved, collected by the Federal Writers Project. – Kirkus Review, June 22, 2016

Winner of the New Americans Prize:It Ain’t So Awful Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

After a rocky start, Cindy (Zomorod to her parents) finds a comfortable niche in her California middle school until political upheaval and revolution in Iran reach the United States, threatening her future and her family’s safety. Her engineer dad, who loves to talk about the oil industry, and her unhappy mom, who won’t learn English, pose bigger obstacles to fitting in. On her own journey to maturity, Cindy deftly guides young readers through Iran’s complicated realities in this fresh take on the immigrant experience—authentic, funny, and moving from beginning to end. – Kirkus Review, February 17, 2016

Finalists for the 4th annual Children’s History Book Prize:

Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly by Deborah Noyes
Young Nellie Bly had ambitious goals, especially for a woman at the end of the 19th century, when the few female journalists were relegated to writing about cleaning or fashion. But fresh off a train from Pittsburgh, Nellie knew she was destined for more and pulled a major journalistic stunt that skyrocketed her to fame: feigning insanity, being committed to the notorious asylum on Blackwell's Island, and writing a shocking exposé of the clinic’s horrific treatment of its patients. Plentiful black-and-white photographs, cartoons, newspaper pages, and artifacts expand the sense of time and place in this lively biography that reflects the spirit of the intrepid reporter. – Kirkus Review, November 3, 2015

Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk
World War II is raging and families in ­Annabelle’s rural Pennsylvania community have lost sons, but the conflict is a distant one. Painting rural life with an even hand, [Wolk] shows its beauty and its hardship, the strong ties that bind people who live in the country and the intolerance that sometimes finds root there. With a precociously perceptive girl as a main character; a damaged, misunderstood recluse; and themes of prejudice and bigotry, comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will abound. But Wolk gives us her own story—one full of grace and stark, ­brutal beauty. – New York Times, May 5, 2016

Winner of the 3rd annual Children’s History Book Prize:

Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Muñoz Ryan’s Echo beautifully weaves together the individual stories of a boy in Germany during the early 1930s, two orphans in Pennsylvania during the mid-1930s, and a Mexican girl in California in the early 1940s as the same harmonica lands in their lives, binding them by an invisible thread of destiny. All the children face daunting challenges—rescuing a father from the Nazis, keeping a brother out of an orphanage, and protecting the farm of a Japanese family during internment—until their suspenseful solo stories converge in an orchestral crescendo.

Helen Frost brings us a rare story, written completely in verse, of two boys growing up in the Indiana Territory in 1812. Anikwa and James’ worlds are the same and totally different. Both are 12-year-olds who love to hunt and explore the natural world. But when war between the United States and Great Britain breaks out in their own backyards in Fort Wayne, Indiana, precious commodities like salt become scarce. This conflict threatening the lives of Anikwa’s Miami tribe and white settlers like James. Frost shows us how the War of 1812 divided native and settler communities who had enjoyed a brief period of peace and mutual dependence, and gives readers a peek at a conflict rarely explored in schools.

Finalists for the 2nd Annual Children’s History Book Prize:

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
In vivid poems, Woodson shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s. Each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged. Each line offers a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. (National Book Foundation)

Courage Has No Color, The True Story of the Triple Nickles: America’s First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone
During World War II, African American soldiers were often relegated to service and security jobs and denied training, as well as active-combat positions available to their fellow white soldiers. Expertly woven together are two narratives: the large, overarching history of rampant racism in the U.S. Military and the smaller, tightly focused account of a group of black soldiers determined to serve their country and demonstrate their value as soldiers. They faced multiple setbacks as they encountered racism, sometimes justified as “policy.” (School Library Journal)

One Came Home by Amy Timberlake
Set in Placid, Wisconsin, in 1871, One Came Home tells the story of 13-year-old Georgie Burkhardt’s quest to track down the truth about her missing sister. The story unfolds during the largest passenger pigeon nesting season ever seen in North American, and Timberlake captures the life of this Midwestern town, Georgie’s shop-keeping family, and how the pigeon nesting could transform the landscape and economy of a small town.

Winner of the 1st annual Children’s History Book Prize:

The Lions of Little Rockby Kristin Levine
In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy 12-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

Finalists for the 1st Annual Children’s History Book Prize:
(book descriptions from the Library of Congress)

Crow by Barbara Wright
In 1898, Moses Thomas’s summer vacation does not go exactly as planned as he contends with family problems and the ever-changing alliances among his friends at the same time as he is exposed to the escalating tension between the African-American and white communities of Wilmington, North Carolina.

Diamond in the Desert by Kathryn Fitzmaurice
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thirteen-year-old Tetsu and his family are sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona where a fellow prisoner starts a baseball team, but when Tetsu’s sister becomes ill and he feels responsible, he stops playing.

No Crystal Stair by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
Told by a banker that he should sell fried chicken rather than books, since "Negroes don’t read", Lewis Michaux defies the odds to build Harlem’s National Memorial African Bookstore, an intellectual center and gathering place from 1939 to 1975.

Read these books and more like them in the New-York Historical Society's monthly family book club, Reading into History.

The Lions of Little Rockby Kristin Levine
In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy 12-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

To submit books for consideration for the 5th Annual New-York Historical Society Children’s History Book Prize, please send six reader copies to: